I have decided to join the blogging craze. I am looking forward to taking a moment to find out a little more about the plants I have been photographing. I hope to explore all aspects of plants, flowers, trees and other garden related topics. Sorry about having to watermark the photos but there are a lot of people using them without permission.

Thursday, January 22, 2009

Purple Ninebark

This is the flower of one of the nicest foliage plants to come out in a long time. The dark reddish purple leaves add a lot of drama to the garden. These flowers are almost inconspicuous compared to the leaves. ‘Diabolo’ gets a little bigger than the 4-6 feet advertised; it is quite a vigorous grower. There are several other nice Ninebarks available including the dwarf ‘Summer Wine’, which has smaller leaves and stays a lot shorter. I am also partial to Golden Ninebark as it a nice splash of color. Most Ninebarks require hard pruning every once in awhile.

Today we are loading up the car and driving out to California from Connecticut. Ruby, Juno, the computers and quite few cameras are going. Oh and of course Karen is going too. There may not be many updates for the next couple of days although I am interested in trying Blogging on the road. Certainly when we get to San Diego I plan on taking a lot of pictures and posting regularly.